Halloween Speed Build Contest!

These 5 missions were created in the short span of less than two months to be released before a Halloween deadline. In spite of the short development time many missions represent some of the strongest efforts from their submitters...

Enjoy your extended Halloween!

Samhain Night on Bone Hill

By: PranQster

"Samhain... the festival of the new year, the harvest, the onset of winter, and celebration of the dead.

The pagans who celebrate it are likely dancing around fires in the forest right about now. The Builders see to it that the celebrations don't take place in the city. The townsfolk mostly stay indoors this night.

A good night for me to go looting. I have something special in mind this year... (more)

... (the tomb) houses a large Ruby which nobody has ever been able to steal, though every few years some taffer decides to try...

... I have never been a superstitious man, and nobody in this town has my skills. This year the ruby will be mine. Bugger their stupid curse.

This should be easy. The town is quiet and the cemetery unlikely to have guards or many visitors this night. It should be a simple matter of entering the tomb, prying up the ruby, and leaving."

Special Thanks:
Nosslak for the plague mask and Springheel for the jack-o-lantern

House in Blackbog Hollow

By: Stumpy

You've been hired by an old man to steal a sack of ancient items from a locked crate outside a warehouse in the small walled village of Black Bog, about 25 miles east of Bridgeport, the old man lives in an old ramshackled shack east of Black Bog church, you are to take the box to him as soon as you get it.

Known Issues:
Map has not been betatested, so may break if you knockout or kill anyone or thing in the house or beyond, its also impossible to get all the loot there's always about 150 missing from total loot at the end.

A Night to Remember

By: Fieldmedic

Diary entry, 20th of October, 1721

Say one thing about Sir Henry Doyle, say he's a taffing idiot. Yes, I admit that. Only a taffing idiot would try to rob Lord taffing Cromwell, much less do it while being his honoured guest. I came out here to enjoy the quiet countryside and to study under the great inventor so that I could forget about all the troubles back in Bridgeport. But I suppose they didn't forget about me, nor did the Lady Terevaine. She must've found out I was staying at Cromwell's estate somehow, seeing as she had a letter delivered to me right in the middle of supper. Could barely keep a straight face as I read it. The nerve of that woman... Thankfully, my fellow guest at the mansion, Father Tellam, had another heated argument with Cromwell about the whole Gottfried II project. Called it a great sin against the Builder and all that. Ironic, considering what

Lady Terevaine wrote to me, but it did give me the perfect excuse to retire for the night. Still, it seems I have yet another job to do for this little shrew. And like always, she promises that this one will be the last of them before she finally helps me with my debts. For the life of me, I will never understand what she gets out of these oddjobs, but I suspect it might just be some form of deranged joy at seeing me stumble around robbing everyone I know. And this time, she wants me to steal Lord Cromwell's very passion, the blueprints for his beloved airship. That in itself will not be a hard task, given that Cromwell doesn't allow any guards indoors. From what he has told me, I suspect the blueprints to be in his study on the second floor of the east wing. I'll need to be careful, however. Cromwell is a dangerous man and should my hand in this be known, he will make my money problems seem like a pleasant afternoon stroll. I'll need to mask this theft as a robbery, so I should try and steal as much as I can, perhaps smash a window or two along the way. With any luck, I'll find enough goods to actually pay my debts and get free of that taffing Lady Terevaine..."

It's time to release my entry for the Halloween contest; A Night To Remember

This one took me about one and a half month to complete. It would not be possible without the eminent assistance of Ziggun and my girlfriend. Thanks a lot! A thanks goes to Kimdawg for creating the pianomusic.

Thanks to my betatesters - Bikerdude, Xarg and PranQster. Also a big thank you to all the folks that keeps the mod alive and evolving!

Enjoy!

This is a mission with certain enemies that are extremely dangerous. There are a few known issues on them but I will give you a chance to play the mission before spoiling the nature of the enemies.

The Creeps

By: Mortem Desino

It crawls upon human minds why some are bound up in grave sins.
For what does it profit a man if he remains devoted to the nether creatures?

Surely such deeds shall earn no portion from the Lord Builder.

Such a man has destroyed his high place in Heaven.

--Bishop Deifer, Letters to the Builder ClericsThis is a small experimental gameplay FM, exploring a few shock/creep/horror capabilities of TDM. It was designed to be played but one time: so give yourself some time to explore a relatively small space.

Dragon's Claw

By: Bikerdude

"I usually welcome the shadows, a place of refuge for a master thief like me. However, there are dark places that even I fear. That place being the plague ward at the edge of town. Rumour has it that it was cursed by a pagan witch and it's inhabitants died from an incurable plague..."

Build Time:
Update Build Time:
3-4 weeks.

Credits:
Pre-built maps and textures - Flanders (The man who built the Training
Mission donated 12 or so old maps which I hobbled together)

Thanks:-
As always respect to the Dark Mod team and for all the hard work they put and continue to put into it. Special thanks to Fidcal, Serpentine and others for their help on the forums and to my beta testers: Flanders, Sir Taffsalot, nbhor1more, PranQster, RPGista, Thor, Xarg, Glyph Seeker.

Known gameplay issues:-

* No map, its linear enough not to need one
* Ai wont patrol/walk over the bridge - you'll see where etc and I tried everything I know to get them to walk over - nada.
* Mission isn't challenging enough - I didn't have the time to tweak this at all.

Bugs:
* There is no loading screen. You will see The Dark Mod logo for quite some time after selecting your difficulty at the Objectives screen. (Give it some time to load).
* The mission freezes for no apparent reason in some spots, but thankfully isn't only a one or two.
* There is a broken visportal in the plague-ward at street level.
* The EscZone needs to be bigger -to complete the mission"stand right in front of the fireplace in * the tavern, in front of the mage"

BONUS MISSION!

...

While the contest entrants toiled away with their work, a new mapper "Sir Taffsalot" was preparing his mission for release. With help from Bikerdude (!) Sir Taffsalot was able to release his mission during the final month of the contest!

Let Sleeping Thieves Lie

By: Sir Taffsalot and Bikerdude

( Not a Halloween Speed Build Contest entry.)

A couple of days ago I was hired for an unusual job. I was asked to assassinate the leader of the Unseen thieves guild jack Blackthorn. People have been known to say he is the devil himselfI don't usually take assassin missions but ever since I refused to join the Unseen thieves guild, Jack Blackthorn has wanted me dead. So i took the opportunity to eliminate the threat.The mission went well and I managed to put a broad-head Through Blackthorns black heart. Yesterday I was at the Builder's Arms and overheard a conversation. Jack Blackthorn had returned from the dead to take revenge on the person who killed him. His grave was found open with nothing inside.

This doesn't sound good for me. I'm going to infiltrate. The Unseen thieves guild in the sewers and see just what's going on.While the city sleeps I might as well take the opportunity to make some profit. Word on the street is that the local church has a valuable artifact called the Dagger of St. Dunstan. That should fetch a nice price.

I have a bad feeling about this. I don't like dealing with the undead. it's best to let sleeping thieves lie.

A great big thank you to Bikerdude for helping me finish this FM Thanks to my bete testers - Bikerdude, Glyph seeker, Ppoe, ithel, Mcphisto2051, Lost soul, Pranqster, Nbohr1more and Xarg. Thanks to anyone who replied to any of my questions in the TDM editors guild. (Thanks for humoring a noob.)

And last but definitely not least thanks to the TDM team for countless hours of fun over the last two years and for many more I'm sure to come.

All these missions can be downloaded in the in-game downloader tool or from The Dark Mod missions page:

I originally thought "Christmas" but there's something wrong about posting Halloween stuff at Christmas (even if you aren't religious... LOL).

New Years was suggested then a couple of folks felt that would be too long and anticlimactic which made sense to me, it says "Meh, who cares about the voting results of this contest. It's just a formality".

To be honest, the player demographic for this mod seems to sway to older players with less free-time so having a longer voting period still makes sense. But for the sake of promotion a tighter schedule keeps it more alive. Plus the players are forced to "speed-play" these "speed-builds" so the urgency is passed along.

The precise date is because it's a week into the month (a little buffer) and on a day where I can be pretty assured that I can tabulate the results in peace.

Cool enough. I was just curious if there was something specific about the 11th.

...about the "revisingmentations": since I know that you are sort of the Organizer, can you maybe see what you can do about getting the practice of FM revisions systematized? As in herding the FM author cats towards a standard practice of "versioning" their releases? By, for instance, making sure all revisions (bug fixed) are signified in the "darkmod.txt" and also clear notifications of such are put in the first post of FM threads... and so ...and so forth?

I hope you see what I'm getting at and that you agree it would be nice to have this as a part of "How to Release a Fan Mission".

With regard to bugs in these missions, they are remarkably low on problems save the most ambitious mission (size and architecture wise), "Dragon's Claw". Biker has done a good job of being forthright about all the issues and it's still a playable mission so there ya go. PranQster's mission first had some severe issues but those were corrected very shortly after his first released version near the beginning of the contest.

I think you'll like 'em all. No reason to wait on fixed versions even if Biker is planning a revision for his version.

The new frontpage is much easier to manage to push-out updates to the mirrors but... Mappers should be more explicit about updates to their versions. I will be keeping the wiki updated to include revision details so hopefully these complications can be minimized.

I wonder if they could add an "unofficial repository" configuration area to the mission downloader tool kinda like the "Universe" repository in Synaptic Package Manager so that folks who want to download unofficial or non-vetted missions (or missions that the Team doesn't want representing the mod) can do so with the same convenient interface...

"Let Sleeping Thieves Lie" was quite a surprise and is a damn fine mission. I understand completely why Biker took time away from the contest to help on it. The concept was compelling, and the layout of the map just had this classic vibe. A nice sampler type mission too with many of the same variations that Biker was drawn to for his own mission "St Alban's Cathedral". Best of all, it hit before Halloween and had the spooky vibe appropriate for the season.

Our resident curmudgeon over at the forums voiced a concern that was all too likely for the contest... which is that these missions would be small, sloppy and buggy. In fact: the missions were reasonably large for the time allotted for creating them, the missions were cleanly built often with stunning visuals and, very low on bugs. (As if the participants had specifically set-out to silence all those concerns).

(I still hope to see another Halloween contest where a longer stretch is allotted to the mission authors though.)